actually lessens the pain—

anyone who asks you to hold your tongue

is asking you to hold the heaviest thing

in the galaxy. Forget them and remember you

can tell me anything about how hard it is

to stop flirting with your expiration date.

I understand being wooed by the finish line

of sadness. Infinity still sends me nudes

every day. I won’t deny she looks amazing,

but I’m taken. My hand now promised

to writing every page of my story

except its end. Friend, you are

who taught me that a difficult life is not less

worth living than a gentle one. Joy is just easier

to carry than sorrow, and you could lift a city

from how long you’ve spent holding

what’s been nearly impossible to hold.

This world needs those who know

how to do that. Those who can find

a tunnel with no light at the end

of it and hold it up like a telescope

to show that the darkness contains

many truths that can bring the light

to its knees. Grief astronomer,

adjust the lens, look close. Tell us

what you see.

INSTEAD OF DEPRESSION

try calling it hibernation.

Imagine the darkness is a cave

in which you will be nurtured

by doing absolutely nothing.

Hibernating animals don’t even dream.

It’s okay if you can’t imagine

spring. Sleep through the alarm

of the world. Name your hopelessness

a quiet hollow, a place you go

to heal, a den you dug,

Sweetheart, instead

of a grave.

WHAT LOVE IS

She was on tour with me. She was on tour with me because I’d always preferred long distance, and I’d finally grown wise enough to know never to trust my preferences. Driving to a show one day we realized the venue where I’d be performing was only thirty minutes from her parents’ home. I hadn’t met them yet and wasn’t sure I ever would, when out of nowhere they called and asked her to add them to the guest list. One tear sprinted down her cheek like it was running to a mailbox to open a letter it had been waiting for for seven hundred years. As for me, I vomited in my mouth and swallowed it like a champ.

It had been two decades since she came out. Two decades since her heart was something they had sincerely asked about. She grew up in the rural south. Five sisters and no telephone. Her father would have to sprint down the road to her grandpa’s house to take a call about a job. Before hearing that, I hadn’t known it was possible to work in oil and gas and not be rich, imagined him breaking his back on an oil rig in the Gulf Coast but really didn’t have a clue what he actually did. She didn’t have a clue what inspired them to want to come, but I suspected they’d heard the word poetry and thought, That’s gay in a good way. Thought Walt Whitman with his cock still respectfully in the closet, stanza-ing about a shaft of summer grass, longing for only dogwood trees and lily pads. What I was certain of was that they weren’t coming because they knew I’d ended my last show with a poem about how church yard sales are secretly the best places to buy dildos.